Mirrors
Symbol Analysis

At the beginning of Speak, Melinda despises mirrors. She thinks her reflection looks ugly in her bedroom mirror, and covers up the mirror in her closet with a poster of Maya Angelou. In fact, whenever Melinda sees her reflection in the novel, she notices her flaws and is disgusted by herself. This hatred of her own image symbolizes Melinda’s deeper self-loathing. She believes, on some level, that it was her fault that Andy Evans raped her, and until she comes to understand that the assault was not her fault, she will always hate herself for what she perceives as her own weakness and stupidity. In the end, however, Melinda uses a mirror as a weapon, shattering the one in her closet in order to threaten Andy as he attempts to rape her. She has, metaphorically at least, regained control over her own image.

Mirrors Quotes in Speak

The Speak quotes below all refer to the symbol of Mirrors. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:

).
Note: all page numbers and citation info for the quotes below refer to the Farrar Strauss Giroux edition of Speak published in 2011.

Part 1, Chapter 6
Quotes

I look for shapes in my face. Could I put a face in my tree, like a dryad from Greek mythology? Two muddy-circle eyes under black-dash eyebrows, piggy-nose nostrils, and a chewed-up horror of a mouth. Definitely not a dryad face. I can’t stop biting my lips. It looks like my mouth belongs to someone else, someone I don’t even know. I get out of bed and take down the mirror. I put it in the back of my closet, facing the wall.

I hide in the bathroom until I know Heather’s bus has left. The salt in my tears feels good when it stings my lips. I wash my face in the sink until there is nothing left of it, no eyes, no nose, no mouth. A slick nothing.

I reach in and wrap my fingers around a triangle of glass. I hold it to Andy Evans’s neck. He freezes. I push just hard enough to raise one drop of blood. He raises his arms over his head. My hand quivers. I want to insert the glass all the way through his throat, I want to hear him scream. I look up. I see the stubble on his chin, a fleck of white in the corner of his mouth. His lips are paralyzed. He cannot speak. That’s good enough. Me: “I said no.”